KVM’s Creators Follow Up With General Availability Of Ravello Systems, A Virtualization Engine For Test And Dev

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Ravello Systems went into general availability today with an emphasis on providig a test and development platform for enterprise apps.

At the time of its $26 million funding in February, Ravello focused much of its message on this concept of the capsule, which served as its metaphor for the way it would shoot applications into the cloud for testing.

The metaphor is still true but the emphasis is on the value of the company’s application hypervisor, its core technology, designed to behave like a KVM or VMware hypervisor in the cloud. With the service, enterprtise applications are uploaded to Ravello where it then runs in the cloud for testing. Once fully tested, the app is then ready to be used back on-premise where it originated.

As I wrote in February, the technology is uniquely suited to the new reality of the cloud and on-premise systems:

The capsule contains all the varying requirements needs for an app to work in a cloud environment. Multiple virtual machines can be placed in one capsule, which cuts down on the cost of deploying to a service like AWS. Instead of launching 10 separate virtual machines on AWS, the capsule may contain just two, making it cheaper to use Ravello than testing on AWS itself. The capsule can be deployed to any public cloud service.

The company has a great pedigree — its founders developed the KVM virtualization technology. The new Ravello application hypervisor takes the concept of virtualization on a different tangent. It’s not like VMware’s technology, originally designed for on-premise static servers. It’s meant for testing enterprise apps in dynamic cloud environments.

Ravello has a unique hypervisor but they are still as much subject to competition as any provider pursuing the test and development market. Amazon Web Services, companies like Eucalyptus and Skytap are just a few of the competitiors that also provide core test and development services.

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Crunchbase

OverviewRavello Systems is the industry’s first Cloud Application Hypervisor provider. With Ravello, enterprises can encapsulate their multi-VM applications and run them anywhere – on-premise or in any cloud – without making any changes whatsoever, and thereby implement a true hybrid cloud. Ravello is offered via an easy to use Software-as-a-Service and enables developers, devops and IT to use the unlimited …